Unlocked
by AllSeeingMeli
Summary: A slightly different direction for the infamous Sylar/Claire scene in "Invisible Thread". Connected to "All The Time In The World" via Sylar's obsession with the inner workings of Claire's grey matter.
1. Chapter 1

Like so many others, I just had to try my hand at expanding the "Invisible Thread" Sylar/Claire scene.

* * *

He is trying to make her cry, or vomit, or beg, or do something to humiliate herself, she's convinced of it. He inevitably wants to make fools of all who have ever gotten in his way. He is coolly listing her loved ones who will die, he is running casual fingers along her cheek and talking of "building bridges," he's making her sip wine with him while her stomach churns in protest.

"I'm proud of you, Claire," he croons mockingly into her ear, "you're being so brave." From the corner of her eye, she sees him glance down and smirk at the slightly quaking wine glass in her hand. "This is a big day for both of us. I'm going to move way up in the world, and you-" Sylar tips his glass in her direction, "get to sneak in some underage drinking while Daddy's not around."

"Funny, wouldn't think you'd make much of a politician," she says quietly through gritted teeth, "You'd actually have to convince people to like you."

But he's ignoring her snide words, trying to discern the topic that causes her the most discomfort. He buries his fingers in her hair at the sensitive spot where her neck meets her skull. "It's okay, really, I know how it feels to have no control over your body when you do something terrible. You just look down at your hands" he uses the invisible strings to lift her unoccupied hand, palm turned up, "and their not following your lead anymore." Her possessed hand slowly curls it into a grotesque claw, tendons tightening, and she knows that if she could feel pain this would hurt. She remembers a time when he was careful with her, like she might break. A time when he was unsure of his evil.

"Stop it," she mutters angrily, with as much authority as she can muster. The feeling of watching your own body move without your order is a little bit like moving through the spiraling walkway in a funhouse - you're not quite sure whether it is you or everything around you that is in motion. The lack of pain just adds to this sensation.

Claire watches her hand spiral almost to the point of breaking, in both directions, then watches it relax down lightly onto his knee. Her brain cannot send the signal to wrench it away.

"But you spend so much time in control, Claire, it's such a shame. You've decided that the only thing you can control is yourself, because you're realizing that no one else around you has a clue." It's true - people don't live the way they're supposed to, they don't die the way they're supposed to, and they aren't the heroes they're supposed to be. She is supposed to be here in this room with Nathan, protecting him with her impenetrable courage. Sylar should be dead or, in the best of all possible worlds, feeling every bit of pain that she has missed out on since their meeting at the Bennett house. Or her father should be here to free her

from her puppet master.

Although he could just use his powers to make her look at him, Sylar uses his hands. He sets both of their wine glasses on the table, then raises his hands and snakes both index fingers along her jaw line. She is sickened by the excited twitching of his finger pads and the slight smell of luxury soap mixed with his wine-tinged breath. She tries to dissociate, to force amnesia, to become a part of the wall or carpet.

Sylar grasps her face in both of his hands, turning her head to look her in the eye. An unacceptable boundary has been crossed: There has never before been so much physical contact between them.

"You're trying to be unbreakable so that you can save all of the weak people around you. You think that because you can't die, you're not allowed to feel fear. But I can show you so much about yourself if you just admit that you're afraid." His gaze is absolutely confident, and mockingly benevolent. She wants to gouge the patronizing certainty out of those eyes.

Claire is proud that the words come so clearly and with such audible disgust when she feels so far away. "Stop acting like you know me. Believe me when I say that you can't offer me anything better than the privilege of getting to kill you." Her gift of singular conviction has always matched his. She will kill him, and no other reality can exist. Because the present psychological warfare is becoming unbearable.

Sylar's hands mercifully fall away from her face and he removes himself from the couch, disappearing from her line of sight before she has a chance to see the impact of her rejection on his face.

"I know you can't talk about it right now, Claire. How petrified you are." His voice is moving away from her. "You're still in the thick of it, absorbing everything, in fight-or-flight mode." A door opens, shoes click on tile, Sylar's voice echoes off of the bathroom walls. "But I can help you work through that." A drawer opens. "You're fighting the wrong battles and running away from the wrong people." A rustling of cloth and a clacking of metal.

Claire clenches her jaw tightly and the air leaving her nostrils increases in pressure. Sylar has not allowed her the range of motion to even turn her head in his direction, and the lack of available visual information is maddening. _No matter what he's doing, he can't hurt you_, she tells herself. But the word _hurt_ has exhausted itself, she doesn't know what it means anymore.

She has given up on responding verbally to him. To speak is to give him more information to use against her, or to show her how little her conviction matters to him, and she cannot stand to feel any more ineffectual. Her only available tactic at the moment is shutdown, autopilot. She will sew her mouth shut for eternity before allowing him to play conversational games with her.

She hears a soft padding on the carpet behind her, then feels his breath on her hair. "It's okay, Claire, I'm learning a different kind of language. Something that comes before speech." If she weren't giving him the silent treatment, she'd remind him that two-year-old's shared this in common with him.

As Sylar places his arms behind her back and under her legs, her neck and head are finally allowed back under her control. She stares at his face, radiating her intent to shut him out, to hold herself out of his grasp mentally if not physically. It's the same message that a defiant child aims at her parents when they make her sit at the dinner table and finish her spinach.

He looks inspired as he lifts her off the couch, his eyes wide and childishly hopeful even as his mouth curves into a competitive smirk. _How are you going to try to fight me this time?, _the smile asks.

In a spasm of hatred, she spits in his face. Anything to shove a little humiliation back into his head. Still holding her like a baby, not changing his expression in the slightest, he uses her hand to wipe the spit off of his cheek and lips slowly, too slowly. It is meant as a threat - something about using those hands however he chooses to. Turning the body against itself is a torture technique used by countless interrogators.

Claire looks away, trying again to turn her growing panic to stone, but her eyes are caught by the wooden table toward which he is carrying her. There is a large white towel covering most of it, and a collection of metal objects lying near the edge, surgical, unidentifiable, clean. Blades and metal should have a different set of associations when you cannot die, but Claire feels the squirming dread in her stomach press harder.

Sylar lays her down on the towel with deliberate composure. "I'm going to do all the hard work for you. All you have to do is stay calm, don't lose your head." He laughs quietly to himself, then waxes sober. "If this drives you insane, than I'll just have to talk you back down to reality." He lays a reassuring hand on her forehead. "My reality is extremely persuasive, I promise you."

Then he opens her skull, again.

* * *

This will continue... Now that I have dragged out my old psych/neuro books for inspiration, I'm afraid there is no turning back ;)


	2. Chapter 2

The deafening rattling sound and vibrating sensation of bone being cut. Absent of physical pain, Claire's cringing is caused by the psychological deja vu of the trauma. It is the anguish of violation, a total security breach of body and spirit. When the incising ends, she is shaking with the flood of adrenaline, fists balled, clenching her jaw harder than sin to stave off hysterics.

"Interesting," Sylar notes soberly, his complete composure unforgivable. "The last time we were here, in this position, you were so calm, so peaceful." The scientist has already begun noting his observations. Metal clinks close to her right ear.

"I thought I was dead," Claire whispers through her teeth, holding back panic. They are referring to a time before the knowledge of her never-ending existence. She can almost remember what it felt like lying on that coffee table in her Costa Verde home. Seeing and hearing but not believing that the next moment would come, and therefore not needing to anticipate or prepare for it. Sensation and perception without judgment. Zen.

"I see." He leans in close over her forehead, making sure his face is in her line of sight. His hands are not. "And now you know you can't die, poor girl. The reality of losing your life is something you never have to face again." He give his best possible therapist impression, brow furrowed: "How does that make you feel?"

She gives her worst possible therapy-client impression: "Mad. Sad. Glad." Tremors shake her voice but she meets his gaze.

"Tell me what you're thinking," Sylar pushes, stroking her cheek with one hand, and drawing his other elbow up next to her head, so that she can see the strange metal tongs that he is holding in that hand.

"We could have this chat without you ripping off my skull," she whispers, clinging to whatever threads are left of her courage. It is not as if an admission of fear on her part will make this interrogation end. She will not believe that this manipulative monster has mercy for her, even if she reveals every nuance of her psyche to him.

Sylar moves his unoccupied hand down her neck, and toys with the necklace Nathan gave to her. "Your feelings are part of the puzzle, Claire. I need to know what makes you fall apart so I can put you back together." His tone is one of patient assurance, of a doctor promising the cure to a terrible disease.

Claire Bennett has never fallen apart, it has never been in her nature to react in that way. She has fallen down too many times to count, but she has never lost the pieces of herself.

"As soon as my dad gets here, you'll get to see quite a bit about my feelings," she assures him for a second time today. The desperation is obvious in her voice, giving her statement a tragic thinness.

Sylar ignores her threat. With elbows on either side of her head, he turns the Y-shaped metal device over several times above her face, then sends a playful blue spark across the space between the two arms of the Y.

"There are so many paradoxes regarding the human brain," he reflects excitedly. "It speaks to itself through electrical impulses. If you speak back to it with delicacy and accuracy, you can recreate or amplify its natural behavior. But if you get too overzealous, if you use too much energy, it short circuits everything, ruins the balance-"

"Don't," she finally breaks in, faced with details of his plan. "Don't take anything else." Her eyes are burning with the continuing sight of electric blue snaking in front of her face. "I'm afraid, okay? I'm terrified."

A torture victim desperately wants to believe that they have some form of volition, choice, control - that if they give the perpetrator the information requested, they will be rewarded with the ceasing of punishment. They will carry this belief beyond all logic and evidence, because they have to believe that there is a way out of the hell they face. Claire does not wanted to be this jaded victim. But she is only human.

Sylar's face softens into sympathetic grin. "Thank you for your honesty, Claire. I love chipping away at the walls you put up." He slides back in his chair with the metal fork, out of her sight, the crackle of electricity continuing.

"No, stop! No, please no! Sylar, stop! Please, Sylar!" Her range of language narrows to four repeating words as the floodgates of panic open. Eyes bulging, she twitches and twists violently within the centimeters of physical space that his puppet-control has left her. "Please, no-"

The rush of pleasure is so beautiful and shocking that her eyes overflow with tears. It shoots into her stomach and arms and legs and tingles across every nerve ending in cacophonous disorder. The pleasure begins to solidify into thoughts and memories, welcoming her, and Claire lets go of reality.

The pleasure is connected to every joy she has ever experienced - every moment with family and friends, years forgotten in the stress of battle, every exhilarating kiss and languid summer vacation and glowing campfire and acrobatic stunt and exalting smile and whimsical daydream that has ever played across her mind.

Most poignant and vivid is her father, the hero and trusted mender of all ills, his first and most necessary incarnation in her life. She has spent her youth memorizing his actions and words so that she can play them back in her mind when he leaves on his trips, and now he is back, he is tying her shoe, reading her bedtime story, smiling, assuring, challenging, believing in her, and she knows the protection of his care. "Daddy," she exalts breathlessly, greeting him after three long years of alienation.

It has been so long since she experienced the depths of her own joy. It is all so simple. She is home. Connected by the intensity of her love, all of her long-neglected memories are threaded together like Christmas lights of different hues.

And there is a voice behind and between the memories, soft and elegant. "It's a fascinating gift that our anatomy gives us, Claire, the ability to store memories based on their emotional...flavor. When you are hurt, you are connected, however subtly, to all of the times you have hurt before. And when you feel pleasure, your brain remembers what made you feel that way, so that you can find it again, and again." These words are comforting and kind, because everything that exists, including this voice, was made for her to embrace. She sinks into her joy, into the voice and her fathers lap and her green Odessa lawn and the hands of the cheerleaders that catch her, into everything that has come back to cradle her.

Seconds may pass, or perhaps an hour, before Claire makes an attempt to locate herself and begins to recognize the separation between what she is seeing in her minds eye and what exists in reality. The hotel room, lying across a table, breathing, sobbing.

"How?" she asks shakily, because it is the only word that comes to mind when she calls for it.

The voice chuckles warmly. "Oh please don't get me started, Claire, or you might be in for an hour long lecture on the inner workings of your dopamine receptors and the roadmap of your limbic system." It whispers animatedly into her ear. "You could say thank you."

_To who? _Without the certainty of her negative emotions, she cannot quite understand this boy as friend or foe. She knows that he has altered and twisted things, made her bare and opened her up. She knows logically how this creature makes her feel. But why would she want to feel that hopeless?

"Limbic system," she fights to speak and remember, and yet also fights the descent of her euphoria. "Maps, of me?" One fight becomes easier as the other becomes futile.

"My brain!" she gasps, and the past and present, pleasure and pain split apart like wood beneath an axe. There is a intense sadness in this divide, then blinding rage, in knowing that her joy exists in the past while she is stuck somewhere else. Knowing that the facilitator of her joy has also caused her so much anguish.

Sylar stands, leaning over her once again, gazing intently at her face as she plummets from dizzying rapture. Absent from her body are the invisible bonds of his puppeteering power, as if he clearly judges her unable or unlikely to move. Claire closes her eyes because she is not sure how to piece together the details in the present or how to deal with his eyes. Too much lost, gone.

"The important thing is that we get to dig into everything in your...closet," Sylar runs both hands across her forehead and temples to the back of her head, outlining his favorite organ, and Claire realizes that she has been put back together, skull mended, while in her euphoric state. "It's beautiful, really," his voice is disgustingly tender. "It will never kill you, and no matter what I do, you will adapt. You'll learn to trust me and understand so much about yourself that no one else could even begin to fathom. You'll get to tell me about every sensation, reaction, and mood-" Sylar chuckles to himself. "And c'mon, Clair, don't I set a mood better than Marvin Gaye?"

Bitterness floods Claire's chest and her eyes pop open. Sylar has incapacitated her, forcing her to experience with aching intensity the purity of innocence and love that fate no longer sees fit to bestow upon her. She is trying valiantly to accept her return to the incredibly disappointing experience that is her life now, to cool the ashes of nostalgia that have been insultingly stirred into glowing embers with a jolt of electricity. And he is now reminding her that she is the lab rat, the favored test subject, the genetic mutant special enough to be desired by scientists the world over for intensive study. It just so happens that this particular scientist is completely mad, and horrifically intimate in his approach.

Claire's anger centers her, and she stiffens with purpose. "You set a mood like teargas," she spits at him. She jerks her right arm up toward the collection of metal objects that she knows had been close to her right ear, barely feeling the puncturing of her hand by one as her fingers grasp at another.

Sylar catches and pins her wrist quickly, his natural instinct to subdue her with human force apparently faster that his instinct to subdue her with his powers.

"You know what I want to add to my list of happy memories?" Claire hisses into his face. Sylar opens his mouth to respond but is interrupted when her left hand flies upward with a metal button she has wrenched from her jeans, and she jams it without a moment of hesitation deep into Sylar's left eye cavity. "This sound!" she yells over the furious, guttural scream that escapes his mouth as he falls backward over his chair, clawing at his eye.

Writhing onto her side, Claire falls to the floor several feet from him. Her invisible physical bonds still have not reappeared. She feels a split second of sheer pride at the amount of pain that she is causing him as he struggles to regain his feet and clear his damaged eye socket at the same time. Her heart jolting instinctively with the suddenly realistic prospect of escape, she rolls onto her hands and knees before moving to her feet.

The sudden rush of blood away from her head causes her to lurch sideways against the table as she steadies the hotel room exit in her vision. _Just couch! Then fireplace! Then door handle!_, she shouts at her hands as the room tilts. She is five feet from the door when she hears a final enraged growl and the ping of a metal button against the table. Claire reaches the door handle and yanks.

And then her body is no longer hers to control. She is pivoted 180 degrees and slammed backward into the door as Sylar approaches, blood streaked like tears down his left cheek. His left eyeball is already beginning to regrow in it's socket, making a nauseating crackling sound. His eyes are wide with outrage, and barely controlled electricity streaks across his chest and between his fingers. He stops several feet from her, breathing laboriously, holding a metal box roughly the size and shape of a matchbox in one hand.

"I know I'm a monster," he growls, "I know this is all wrong. But we don't have forever to spend in this room building bridges, Claire. I can hear your Daddy coming down the hall. And you really know how to get under my skin. So for now, it's an eye for an eye." He flips the box in his hand so that Claire can see the two dozen or so small buttons, like beady insect eyes, spread across its face. _Kind of like a television remote_, some strangely morose part of her brain hints, and she feels her stomach lurch.

Sylar closes the space between them with supernatural speed. Both eyes, fully functional and dark as coal mines, survey her face for a moment, and he leans toward her mouth.

Claire gasps with the realization of his intent, and the sound seems to break his focus. She can hear voices low and determined coming down the hallway. She needs them now, _right now, please hurry!_

_Instead of kissing her against her will, Sylar holds up the box again, his sneer looking like it lacks the proper emphasis. "Occipital lobe," he muses, almost wistfully, almost apologetically. Then he presses one of the small black buttons and Claire goes completely blind._


End file.
